In Lady Tremaine, a brilliant feminist novel, Rachel Hochhauser recasts Cinderella's evil stepmother as not so evil after all.
Lady Tremaine, daughter of a brewer, widow of a nobleman, and parent of two daughters and a stepdaughter, spends her days playing pretend. "For the sake of presentability, all our lives were a performance," she notes. She pretends her dead husband did not leave their estate in never-ending debt. She pretends to know how to mother, pretends she doesn't have to poach birds off royal lands in order to feed her family, pretends that her home is not falling apart around her. If her performance succeeds, its curtain call will see her daughters and stepdaughter married to wealthy noblemen.
Throughout this debut novel, Hochhauser skillfully incorporates details of the Cinderella story into an entirely fresh offering--not merely envisioning Lady Tremaine beyond the confines of the evil stepmother trope but also reframing her story with nuance and intrigue unto itself. "I was old enough to know that death wasn't always bad, and mothers weren't always good," Lady Tremaine reflects. Hochhauser invites questions about what it means to be a mother at all, let alone a good one, and what a cruel and patriarchal world demands of women. Gripping, suspenseful, and brimming with whimsy and wisdom, Lady Tremaine is a stunning retelling of one of the most well-known fairy tales. It's a celebration of strong, powerful women who refuse to limit themselves to societal confines. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer